Storage as a Service (StaaS) What is Storage as a Service (StaaS)?
Storage as a Service (StaaS) is a way for organizations to manage storage capacity and workloads without the overhead costs associated with storage hardware and software or staff time. Organizations subscribe to virtual storage services and simply access and use a vendor’s infrastructure on demand.
- Why use StaaS?
- What are the benefits of StaaS?
- What issues should you consider with StaaS?
- HPE and Storage as a Service
Why use StaaS?
With StaaS, organizations can centralize operations and improve cost management. With a flexible capacity that automatically right-sizes to meet an organization’s exact needs, workloads are better managed without disruption and less oversight. And because StaaS offers utility-like consumption pricing, organizations can allocate budgets more accurately.
What are the benefits of StaaS?
Offering a zero-touch, set-it-and-forget-it experience, StaaS offers a dynamic way to simplify IT operations, complete with the ability to predict and fine-tune storage, all while keeping pace with the soaring data growth that comes from cloud and edge applications. With StaaS, enterprise IT can:
Avoid over-provisioning: The provider administers monitoring, load balancing, and planning capacity, so resources can be right-sized on an ongoing basis.
Reduce infrastructure costs: Storage vendors are responsible for all infrastructure, including hardware arrays, so users no longer need to purchase any storage resources ahead of time, making storage an operational expense instead of a capital-intensive upfront cost.
Centralize: With StaaS, storage is pooled and can be accessed through one unified interface, which reduces data sprawl and helps consolidate infrastructure overall.
Scale capacity and workload: Subscribers of StaaS gain a level of storage responsiveness that scales automatically, dynamically adjusting to changing application, user, and performance demands in real time.
Support digital transformation: By offloading storage management, staff can concentrate on business objectives of greater value to the business, powering an increased pace of innovation.
Decrease latency: With early issue detection and proactive support, StaaS allows organizations to avoid performance issues that can cost a company as much as one percent in sales revenue per 100 milliseconds of latency.
What issues should you consider with StaaS?
Handing off storage management does come with some potential challenges that IT managers should consider. These include:
Integration issues
Organizations often have significant investments sunk into a fleet of storage hardware, which may or may not be compatible with a vendor’s offerings. And while selling off the legacy hardware is possible, getting the full value out of the deal can be difficult.
Incomplete coverage
Some providers are limited in what storage protocols and deployment options they offer, or even struggle to integrate with leading public cloud platforms. These limitations may prevent a provider from fully supporting your heterogeneous and hybrid infrastructure.
Availability
Not all vendors provide a guarantee for performance or effective capacity. Subscribers should negotiate if there are critical service-level agreement (SLA) requirements.
Limited support
Support response times and the technical expertise of post-sales support staff can vary greatly between vendors. In addition, getting extended support and maintenance after the original agreements expire can lead to steep increases in long-term costs.
Political issues
Vendors based in countries outside the United States may be subject to sanctions or other geopolitical conflicts that may limit their ability to provide consistent service.
HPE and Storage as a Service
HPE has been an innovator in as-a-service offerings across the board, from servers to hypervisors to networks to storage, providing the expertise and cost savings organizations need to remain competitive in a data-driven marketplace. We bring decades of thought leadership and deep market understanding into designing our storage infrastructure and strategies to support clients in their data modernization initiatives.
- HPE Alletra provides cloudlike, invisible infrastructure that is AI-driven, enabling IT organizations to offload owning and maintaining data storage and instead simply accessing and using it. Using HPE’s subscription-based Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC) management platform, organizations get intent-based provisioning, upgrades, and data services through a consumption experience wherever their data lives.
- HPE GreenLake for Storage offers a cloud experience everywhere, so you can reduce storage complexity, simplify operations, and run any application with optimal performance and resilience. HPE GreenLake for Block Storage is the industry’s first storage-as-a-service offering that enables self-service and a 100% availability guarantee built-in for mission-critical environments. It simplifies on-prem storage with SLA-driven quoting and ordering, and AI-driven self-service provisioning for line of business and DBAs. HPE GreenLake cloud services provide partner-integrated and bundled solutions, such as EPIC, for key vertical industry applications, thereby accelerating time-to-production value.